Sunday, June 28, 2009

The point is that human evolution didn't stop 10,000 years ago. The same forces that worked in the past are still working today. The trick is seeing that genes might evolve, but take generations to present as something that people can see.

Culture Speeds Up Human Evolution: Scientific American:Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.

'We found very many human genes undergoing selection,' says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million DNA sequences* showing the most variation. 'Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years.'"

The other point is that space and time are deep fundamentals.

"We think we will be able to find some of the genetic changes that drove human population growth and migrations—the broad causes of human history." *